Visualizing Palestine unites activism and entrepreneurship

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In 2009, Ramzi Jaber quit his job as a civil engineer in
Jerusalem to organize TEDxRamallah. Upon moving to Ramallah to
begin work on the conference, Jaber says he was “floored at my own
ignorance [of people’s struggles in the West Bank]” especially in
light of the huge amount of data that was available. “If even I [as
a Palestinian] didn’t know the story of the Palestinians,” he asks,
“why should foreigners, why should anyone know it?"

Visualizing Palestine, the hybrid startup and
non-profit he went on to launch in collaboration with TEDxRamallah
co-organizer Joumana al-Jabri, operates with the same DIY approach
as the conference; it produces carefully-designed infographics in
hopes of changing how the media and public think about
Palestine.

The key word here is "carefully;" the
company's surprisingly large team of 13 managers, designers, and
researchers, plus 8 – 14 volunteers, implement an eight-part
process (shown to the right, click for larger version or see it
here)
to turn raw data into a story, then tell that story through an
arresting infographic that will hopefully go viral. The process is
meticulous enough to warrant the large team, Jaber says.

Magazines and websites then buy and publish the infographics,
unless they were commissioned, in which case clients then print and
distribute them.

Beginning today, Visualizing Palestine will also dip its toe
(joining many others) into crowdfunding, launching an Indiegogo campaign to fund 20 new
infographics on issues like ID discrimination and children’s
rights.

When asked why he and al-Jabri zeroed-in on infographics when
brainstorming how to tackle this complex issue, Jaber invokes an
experience he had during TEDxRamallah: a visualization of speakers’
nationalities revealed that the conference themes were truly
global, in a way he hadn’t realized before. Also, Jaber says,
“Images are simply more visceral – we’ve been seeing much longer as
a species than we’ve been reading. Infographics appeal to base
human abilities.”

For instance, a soon-to-be-released infographic about the
uprooting of olive trees in Palestine shows the number of trees to
be 33 times greater than the number of total trees in Central Park.
"We only know something is huge if something tiny is next to it,"
Jaber says.

Learning how to tell stories

Despite the sleek graphics (snapped up so far by Al Jazeera, the
Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast among others) now coming out
of the company's idyllic office in Sursock’s
Co-Working +961 space, Visualizing Palestine didn’t exactly hit
the ground running. After launching in 2011, Jaber and al-Jabri’s
first order of business was to organize a series of workshops in
Amman and Dubai, bringing in researchers and designers in hopes of
creating the kind of sophisticated visualized data series they
thought could change the conversation.

“It was a complete failure,” Jaber laughs ruefully. “To this day I
refuse to speak to some of the participants!” Some of the workshop
members, he says, came just to socialize, while the serious
researchers and designers faced problems producing work the other
group found usable: researchers had trouble condensing massive
amounts of data, and designers couldn’t work with data that hadn’t
been carefully groomed.

It was in dealing with this failure that Jaber and al-Jabri were
able to build and streamline the process at Visualizing Palestine
into what it is today. Shortly after the workshop debacle, they
realized that stories are crucial to connecting with people. “The
epiphany was that we needed to build a team with specific skills”
to put the data into story form, and then visualize it, Jaber
explains.

A social mission

While Jaber insists that Visualizing Palestine is indeed a
startup “with a social mission,” from certain angles the outfit
seems more akin to an activist nonprofit. But he rejects having to
choose between the two. “I do not want to pigeon-hole [the company
by choosing] between a company or activist group. We are creating a
new model that successfully incorporates both revenue generation
and addressing social issues in an innovative manner,” he says.

Neither Jaber nor al-Jabri have collected a salary in the two
years they’ve been active (they’re still living off savings from
their previous careers as engineer and architect, respectively);
what revenue streams there are – including commissions (from media
sites, NGOs, even the UN), grants, awards, and eventually
merchandise – are re-invested back into the venture.

The Visualizing Palestine team has also formed an umbrella group –
Visualizing Impact – which creates infographics about social issues
of all stripes. VI’s first graphic, on politicians’ salaries, went
viral this week, retweeted over 100 times by prominent journalists
and others.

In search of a new revenue stream, the decision to try
crowdfunding seems a canny move, for a number of reasons. As Jaber
realized at TEDxRamallah, those most invested in the Palestinian
cause are increasingly people without ancestral ties to the land.
The Indiegogo campaign may tap into this surge of interest in the
plight of Palestinian communities, especially among young
people in the West (those most likely to be familiar with
crowdfunding, and Indiegogo in particular).

But it’s never really been about the profit potential for Jaber
or his team. His commitment to the Palestinian people is palpable
in conversation, although he’s careful to make clear that neither
he nor his organization is aligned with any specific
agenda.